consoles.
“I concur,” Meltzer said from the navigation plotting table.
On the photonics display screens, the whole sky turned blood red, in shimmering sheets and dancing curtains — an awesome aurora caused by the exoatmospheric nuclear blasts. As intended,
Jeffrey waited for reports from ESM and the Radio Room. He waited to see if more missiles took off. He waited to see if the warhead from Victor Three was live and still coming his way.
In the next few minutes, no nuke exploded from the third ICBM that had launched from Srednekolymsk. No more missiles launched anywhere, so far, that he was aware of. ESM and Radio tuned to local news broadcasts, which were being fed incomplete reports from the edges of the worst-affected zone. These helped confirm that — as expected — the electromagnetic pulses had pancaked cities ranging from Moscow to Magnitogorsk. They’d knocked out power and communications in a broad area of European Russia, sowing confusion and chaos, starting electrical fires in everything from large transformers to laptop computers. Rumors and speculation reported by Russian newscasters about the cause of all this varied from UFOs, to an asteroid hit, to nuclear war, to a new German or American secret weapon.
An ELF code group came through meaning Jeffrey should wait fifteen minutes and then commence the next mission phase, and put his script into action — ELF was immune to distant, prompt EMP effects. The wait was to make it look like he’d received and studied a longer message sent by low-frequency radio, with a much faster data rate than ELF.
Even a quarter-hour later, reception at higher, tactical frequencies was heavy with static — hissing and whistling and popping — but Radio managed to make line-of-sight contact with a Tupolev-204 to the east. Jeffrey used his best Russian.
“Tupolev, Tupolev, this is Captain Jeffrey Fuller of the United States Navy, on USS
“American submarine, American submarine, this is Tupolev-Two-Zero-Four, call sign Sable Seven. What are your intentions?”
“Sable Seven, Sable Seven, I have been ordered by the President of the United States to meet in this emergency with your regional commanding rear admiral.”
Nyurba’s surviving commandos, all wearing gas masks now, clambered up the stairwells of the three missile control bunkers, knowing they didn’t have a moment to lose. The explosion of three silos had repulsed one Russian counterattack, and the heat and toxic exhaust of three missiles launching later on had broken up an effective rally by hostile troops still alive in the area. But those two battalions of paratroopers, overheard on the bunker radio before the SS-27s took off, could be here very soon.
Watching things on bunker one’s soundless and two-dimensional TV screens couldn’t have possibly prepared Nyurba for the hellish situation he was engulfed in on the surface. Dense smoke, thick poisonous fumes, and billowing steam drifted everywhere, surrounding and partially cloaking what he thought resembled the site of a terrible airliner crash. The once wide-open missile field, within the fence enclosure, was impenetrably shrouded in deadly smog and persistent flames from asphalt and mangled debris. What passable ground still existed was pockmarked, cratered, and warped, and blackened
The commando groups from the three control bunkers linked up amid this carnage and frenzy, Abakans trained on each other until they were sure they met with friends. At first Nyurba was enraged when he saw his medics and other men dragging travoises improvised from backpack frames, each holding a seriously wounded teammate who should have been lethally overdosed with morphine and abandoned. Platoon leaders said they
Like the others with wounds, the medics had made the Green Beret’s dressings especially thick. They knew, as Nyurba knew, that radioactive particulates could enter the bloodstream through breaks in the skin. There was plenty of nuclear contamination in the air all around them, outside their masks.
Nyurba did a head count: twenty fit, twenty badly wounded, and five wounded who were — generously speaking — ambulatory. He carefully verified with each squad that everyone not present was accounted for as definitely dead; Russian forensic pathologists would have rogue cadavers galore to analyze.
“Change or hide insignia,” Nyurba ordered through his gas mask. “Riffle the Russian corpses.” Concealed by the swirling, noxious, opaque, and multicolored haze, the team removed their Spetsnaz wolf-formation badges, tore off shoulder patches or drenched them in gore, and grabbed uniform markings from bodies strewn everywhere. It was vital they not be recognized as the same unit that had talked its way in at the start of the battle.
Some of the corpses, on closer examination, weren’t quite dead. Nyurba had to look a mortally wounded private in the eyes; he couldn’t be over eighteen. Too weak from loss of blood and shock from burns to be able to talk, the teenager pleaded for help with those dark brown eyes. Nyurba watched the confusion cross his battered, sweaty face as he finished him off with his fighting knife — a gesture of mercy. The kid had no legs and his groin was nothing but smoldering ash. He knew he’d remember those trusting brown eyes for the rest of his life. He removed an insignia badge from the body and fastened it to his own chest.
Having kept his sense of bearings while his squadron regrouped aboveground, Nyurba told them to head for the entrance gate — or whatever was left of it. This would bring them to the route from the support base and Srednekolymsk. He had a hunch that Russian casualty-clearing efforts would have already started, and his intention was to blend in.
Nyurba’s read of the situation paid off. As they trudged along toward the gate, the ends of the travoises scraping noisily on the concrete, more and more Russian medics scurried around, helping whomever they could. One directed Nyurba and his men — filthy, exhausted, coughing repeatedly inside their gas masks — to the field ambulance staging area.
“What happened to those missiles?” Nyurba asked the medic. His lungs hurt when he spoke; it felt like he was getting pneumonia. “Are we in a nuclear war?” He peered at the sky, but it was too smoke-obscured for him to notice any auroral effects.
“I heard someone say they were terrorists, sir. Two went off in space over Moscow. Everything near there got fried.”
“Three launched.”
“The last was a dud, sir. If you can believe the rumors.”
Most casualty transport were commercial trucks pressed into service for the emergency. A harried, emotionally dazed dispatcher said that hospitals at the support base and in the town were overwhelmed. Nyurba had no intention of going to any hospital. The most practical route of egress was the Kolyma.
He told a tractor-trailer driver to take his people to the waterfront. Nyurba sat in the cab. The trip on the excellent concrete road was short. The mines his men planted earlier were cleared. Their victim, the hulk of a blown-up tank, sat partly blocking one lane, turret-less, bathed in firefighting foam. Firemen used their engines to pump water out of nearby streams and ponds, to hold forest fires back from the sides of the road.
